UberGuy

That rather widely misses the point that the goal is to bring in more customers. You want to have net gains in customers, not remain static. Realistically, you will never be able to retain the original subscriber base forever - people will leave for a variety of reasons even if they love the game. You want to at least break even over that attrition, and ideally you want to bring in more than you lose.

Agreed on both that it's for the Very Rare slot and that it's a long time when compared to time from 1 to 50.

There is nothing in a game like this that players can't reduce to rote, even if it involves something random, like movement to avoid the nanite patches in the Apex TF's Battle Maiden fight. Once you've done anything in a game of this sort more than a few times, doing it again becomes an exercise in repetition.

This game, and basically all MMOs, are balanced around metrics of reward/time, with wiggle room for subjective factors of challenge/annoyance/complexity. For example, something that takes a lot of lead time to organize a group to participate might get more reward than its time to complete might suggest, even including that formation time, because coordination of a large group is often non-trivial.

The point is you're never going to find any reward in an MMO that isn't going to eventually devolve into something that someone somewhere will consider tedious once the novelty wears off.

There would be the same constraint of focus on progress versus alts if the devs raised the level cap to 60, especially if they took pains to make sure that it took a lot of active time to progress from 50 to 60.

That's just fundamental in the nature of being an avid alt maker, and has nothing strictly to do with the Incarnate system.

I disagree.

There are two problems here. First, you're basing the value of inf in the game on the value with which RMT suppliers were charging for it. That doesn't clearly track with the value of what an inf will buy in game. A much more accurate way to track that is to actually look at what something costs then and now. Purples have gone up in price something like a factor of 4-8, depending on which ones you're talking about, from just long enough after they were introduced for the prices to settle until now. One of the earliest steady prices I remember seeing for Miracles was 40M inf - about 1/5th of what they cost now.

RMT charge based on both what it costs them to produce inf and with what they think players are willing to pay them for it. It's easier now for an RMT farmer to produce their own inf so their production costs / unit of inf are lower, but because it's easier for lots of players to produce inf, it's harder for the RMT people to sell it. But some means of increasing inf production also increase drop rates of the things we buy with inf, and the ratio of how much stuff the inf is chasing matters. The rate of inf production has gone up, but so has the rate of stuff production. Stuff production hasn't kept pace with inf production, but it's still gone up, sometimes significantly.

Even if you look at it purely in the terms of RMT pricing, our economy hasn't done what several examples in the Wikipedia article describe. We aren't seeing anything approaching 50% per month across the broad market, and 5-10% per day is far and above anything we experience. (Just to give a clear example, 10% price increases compounded daily is about a 18x price increase after 30 days.) We do seem to fit into the 100% over three years category (and then some), but not the others.

I do not have a lack of confidence in holding inf, which seems to be a key component of functional hyperinflation. I know several people who post here do, and I think they're silly. I hold billions of inf in reserve. I don't hold only inf, but I do hold it, and in large amounts. If I avoided high end enhancers, I could fund dozens of level 50 builds with the cash I have at hand.

Yeah, when I saw those numbers, that's what I thought it was.

To be clear, my feeling is that the shard cost is sort of extreme for something you need four of, plus the shards to combine two of them into a Favor, plus all the other bits for the Common and Uncommon slots. And that's for one power.

I'm good at earning this stuff, and I think it's probably high. I posted about that in the thread that was locked in the Developers forum, here.

Only the shards, though. I don't sneeze at 100M inf, but I feel it's a decent number.

I think that's a misleading way to frame that question, for two reasons. The first is that, whether or not you had it to themselves, soloists have gotten systems that they can use. The second reason is that, by their very nature those solo-compatible systems cannot be end-game raid-like content or even compelling reasons to play as a large team. What you want is mutually exclusive with what people are getting now. If you can do it solo, there's no reason to do it on a large team. People who actively wanted raid-like content really only had Hamidon for the longest time, with the RWZ and, very recently, the CoP as much later additions.

With the possible exception of Hamidon, which can be viewed as giving very large rewards compared to the other two raids, none of the existing raid-like content is attached to terribly compelling reasons to get the general population to do them. People do them if they think they're fun, which is good, but it means some servers do them regularly and some don't, depending primarily on whether there's a critical mass of people on any given server who like doing them. If you want to raid but everyone else thinks there's something easier to do, you're out of luck. One very dependable way to avoid that is to attach clear progress to those raid-like activities. That's one way to view what the devs are doing now.

We've said it before in this thread. Run 10 tip missions and you can create something that will sell for around 100M inf. Run 20 tip missions and you can create something you can sell for around 200M inf.

The other group has been being serviced for seven years.

And yet a very vocal part of this game's player base has asked for it, and it is often cited in other places as one reason some people don't stick around.

How many? No idea. But I don't see how you could have an idea either.

One of the more single-target oriented characters I have is a DM/Regen Scrapper, and on her I can create about 5-6M/hour.

I have a DB/Regen Scrapper and a Stone Melee/FA Brute who are both closer to 8M/hour. The character I can hit 9-10M/hour character is actually my Night Widow. I play the /Regens and /FA on +2/x6 and the Night Widow on +2/x8. (Now that I have level shifts on all of them, I've started playing on +3, but have not yet reviewed how it changed my earnings.)

The rates are calculated based on inf from defeats and inf value common recipes sold to a vendor. I log chat, and wrote a log parser than uses the time/date stamps in the logs to break rewards by hour. On nice thing about that is that also includes time spent between missions.

Mostly, I calculated those rates on repeatable content such as Tip missions, Scanner/Paper missions or Borea repeatable missions in the RWZ. They're level 50 and I leveled them the "old fashioned" way running my contact missions, so other than some Ouroboros content, there's not much else for me to do with them solo.

I don't consider either papers or tips "high-reaward". I'm playing what's handy because I like playing the characters. My choices are: do something like what I'm doing, get on a TF, or play something else. How, exactly, do you propose that a level 50 character who already did the content getting to 50 show regard for the game's story without getting on a TF?

It looks like the context I was replying in was missed. I was specifically describing recipe (and salvage) drops, in the context of rate of wealth generation, which came up because of the 100M inf part of the crafting cost of Notices. Shards do indeed have a chance to drop for everyone, and don't follow the rules I was giving.

It's really got not much to do with farming, but it does have something to do with how fast you can defeat stuff, which farmers strive to achieve at very high rates.

Let's say you're on a 8-man team, and the team defeats things such that drops are produced at some average rate X. Every time something drops, someone is chosen to receive it at random. Your average rate of getting something is X/8.

Let's say you go soloing. Alone, you can defeat stuff at a rate that's crates drops at, say, just 20% of what the team could, or X/5. But you get to keep all of those yourself. X/5 is 1.6x as many drops per time as X/8.

Edit: To be clear, the X/5 number in particular is picked out of thin air, and is purely for illustration purposes. If your character is a poor soloist, it's easy to imagine that X/8 is an improvement over what they can manage alone. If they're a strong soloist, it may not be.

I probably don't have a copy. It was posted in the Inventions forum on the old boards, back before it was merged with the Market forum.

I'll look, though. I save oddball things like that sometimes.

Edit: You can find several people reference the occurance in this thread. Arcanaville also separately references the Kheldian slotting bug.

That's not the story I know of. The one I know of (and saw a screenshot of) was someone using the Touch of Lady Grey: Chance for Negative Energy damage at a time when it dealt something like six million points of damage.

There's no way that even 68-slotting any attack in the game would one-shot Hamidon, even before ED. That's only 23.7x damage, and he withstands 30-50 well-buffed people beating on him for several minutes.

OK, but that seems fairly orthogonal. Back when CoV came out, Cryptic still published subscription numbers, and subs did spike with CoV and remain above the previous baseline for a considerable period. There's no question that it added subscriptions, and apparently a fair number of lasting ones at that.

You may have missed my earlier post, which I think is what kicked off the 10M inf/hour number now being bandied about. I can earn that on my 50s, and I'm not farming, and I'm not including profits from selling things on the market. I'm not sure if you're aware, but since we had those "AT earnings/hour" threads, the earning rate of level 50s was doubled. So your cited low-end would now be closer to 1.2M/hour.

Honestly, these days I think a hard-core farmer would be a bit disappointed with 10M inf/hour.

I'm not mentioning that I can 10M/hour because I think it's typical, or because I think you're doing something wrong by not hitting it. The point in mentioning it was to explain why I think a 100M price is not unreasonable. Whether or not you personally can hit that kind of inf creating rate isn't actually that important, because other people are, and the fact that they're pumping that inf into the market system makes it easy for you to get them to do that work for you. It doesn't take any "marketeering", flipping or farming. Just look at the market long enough to find something that sells for close to 100M inf and see how many Alignment Merits it takes to make it. There are actually several things that will net you 90-110M inf/A-Merit, though some cost 2 Merits to craft (but sell for ~200M inf).

People like me are swimming in cash just from doing things we like to do anyway. We're willing to pour it on other people who will supply us with stuff we actually want. Don't be afraid to give it to us at prices we're clearly indicating we're willing to pay.

Not really to disagree with the main thrust of your post, but I find this a bit disingenuous. ED came bundled with CoV, which truly did bring new people to the game. It's vaguely possible that ED somehow managed to increase the player base on its own, but, frankly, I find that vanishingly likely. I find it far more reasonable to think that the game got new players due to CoV, and that offset any departures over ED. (We know it put at least a small dent in the game's population, given that Emmert mentioned it in a what I recall as a post-tenure interview.)

Realistically, none of us will ever know which part was responsible for what fraction of the population shifts, and it's possible even the devs could not clearly deconvolve the causes and effects completely. But whatever the obscured truth really is, what I quoted you saying here makes it look an awful lot like you're attributing the near-term population growth that followed it to the implementation of ED, and I don't think there's any reasonable way any of us could unambiguously draw that conclusion.

I can see where it wasn't clear, because I didn't state it explicitly, but I was being careful to talk about what I was creating, and not at all what I could earn off the market. The whole point was about how much inf level 50s are injecting into the system from whole-cloth fabrication, because that's what actually enables people to pay 10s and 100s of millions of inf on the market, which is what would make my estimate low-ball when we include earnings from selling things there.

I have 9 50s, all of which are incarnated, all of which have at least one rare crafted, and at least 30 shards left over. One, the one I've played the most because I was in the process of earning a high-end IO build for her when all this started, still has 200 shards.

All I do is play existing 50s several hours a day, 5-6 days a week. I run a lot of TFs with friends, and I solo on high difficulty settings when I'm not on TFs.

What's insane about that?